It's actually a little more complicated than that, because the assignment of drive letters is to *partitions*, not to drives. But the basic concept is essentially correct: The BIOS assigns letters to partitions in a certain order. Under Windows 95/98/ME, you can assign CD-ROM and Zip drives specific letters out of this sequence. Windows NT/2K/XP include a "Disk Manager" Utility which also lets you reassign letters to hard drive partitions. I'm not sure you can change C:, although I do have an NT server here on which the BIOS and NT disagree about which drive is C:(!). And when you mount a shared drive/folder from another computer on the network, you can assign it any unused letter. It's common in small-to- medium companies to find that letters in the S:-Z: range refer consistently to the same shared volumes across all workstations, regardless of what (and how many) letters a given machine uses for local storage devices. David Gillett On 7 Aug 2004 at 2:18, [log in to unmask] wrote: > In a message dated 08/06/2004 7:00:56 PM Eastern Daylight Time, > [log in to unmask] writes: > > << (This may sound dumb, but how does my system know what letters to give the > new hard drive when I tell it to format and partition and all that? It's > sort of like chicken and egg time to me.) > >> > Diane the system assigns drive letters by where the drive is > attached and whether its a master or slave position. I believe it > goes C: primary master D: secondary master E: primary slave > F: secondary slave. > > Dennis Dittmar > Maspeth NY 11378 > > The NOSPIN Group Promotions is now offering > Mandrake Linux or Red Hat Linux CD sets along > with the OpenOffice CD... at a great price!!! > http://freepctech.com/goodies/promotions.shtml The NOSPIN Group is now accepting donations to help defer the costs of providing PCBUILD and our website. Visit http://freepctech.com to donate using PAYPAL